Our Values

From the day this platform was founded, we strive to be beyond open and transparent about what we do day to day. This article goes over some of what we believe in, and what we will or won't add to our service.

Ads

We will never run ads in the feed. We will never accept payment for promoted posts of any kind. Users are permitted to post promotions as long as they follow Hey.Café policies.

AI

We will never develop or integrate AI tools into Hey.Café. Any post you create on this service belongs to you and we will never use it to train AI or sell to others for training. Generative AI and other LLMs that are being pushed into everyday life is trained on stolen information, harmful to the environment, heavily unregulated, and frequently used to cause harm unto others. This is antithetical to our values and our policies, and we refuse to work with this technology. All services are hand-made by the developers without the use of AI assistance and moderation is handled by site staff.

Because properly moderating AI content comes with great difficulty, AI generated and altered content is permitted to be posted as long as it follows the policies of Hey.Café. AI cannot be used to alter user content without the express permission from that user, and it cannot be used to impersonate individuals. We offer the ability to tag photos as AI generated, and we also run a check on photos for certain types of metadata to automatically flag photos. We will not integrate the use of content checkers as the data would be sent to third-parties, and depending on the tool, will be used to train their own tools or models. Cafés are allowed to ban AI content from being posted in them as general moderation of cafés is up to the discretion of their creators.

What we do to mitigate AI scraping

In regards to our rules about AI scraping, we do not allow it at all. However, not all scrapers follow the rules, but we try to utilize certain methods in an effort to prevent them from trying.

We have blocks in place to help mitigate content scraping from our media URL at the CDN level. It blocks a large list of useragent strings, identifiers for applications accessing our services, from opening the media. We also use an HTML tag that has become a standard way of saying "No AI scraping". In addition, we have rules set in our robots.txt on our image and API endpoints. While we recognize that not all actors follow the standards and rules behind scraping, we do everything that we can to prevent it